THE GAZE AND THE MIRROR: VISION, DESIRE, AND

THE GAZE A N D THE MIRROR:
VISION, DESIRE, A N D
IDENTITY
IN GONGORA'S
FABULA
DE POLIFEMO
Y
GALATEA
M a r y E. B a r n a r d
Pennsylvania State University
V
ision was the highest and noblest of the senses for early modern poets and philosophers alike. The eyes—transparent windows of the soul—were master organs of intellectual, emotional,
and spiritual transactions (Branna Perlman 113). Gongora's Polifemo, a
poem full of eyes and brilliant spectacles, illustrates this primacy of
vision. In this essay I will focus on the gaze and the mirror to examine
the connection between vision and desire in the fashioning of the identity of the text's three lovers: the monster Polyphemus, his beloved
Galatea, and the rival Acis.1 Gongora's text exhibits both the male and
the female gaze. The spectator/object relation is reciprocal and
fetishization is applied to both sexes.2 Voyeurism, exhibitionism, selfreflexivity, and melancholia are all engaged in the poetics of sight and
desire. To explore Gongora's use of vision in its various modes, I bring
into my analysis theories of optics from the classical and early modern
periods, as well as psychoanalysis, particularly Sigmund Freud's notions of scopophilia and Jacques Lacan's concept of the "mirror stage."
The specular play begins in stanza 24 when Acis, all dust and sweat
in the midsummer heat, enters the secluded spot where Galatea lies
sleeping by the fountain. He looks at her eyes ("ambas luces bellas")
closed by sleep and, while drinking from the fountain waters, continues to look at her out of the corner of his eye: "su boca dio, y sus ojos
cuanto pudo, / al sonoro cristal, al cristal mudo" (191-92).3 In casting
his eyes on Galatea's silent body ("cristal mudo"), Acis enters a world
of visual enticement, of woman as erotic spectacle. Laura Mulvey has
observed: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for
strong visual and erotic impact. . . . Woman displayed as sexual object
is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle:... [S]he holds the look, and plays to
and signifies male desire" (19). In Gongora's text, Galatea's body is at
once a magnet drawing Acis's greedy eyes and an idol to be adored:
"El bello iman, el idolo dormido, / que acero sigue, idolatra venera"
CALfOPE Vol. 8, No. 1 (2002): pages 69-85
70
so Mary E. Barnard
(25.197-98). Spectacle and desire are neatly combined to fashion Acis's
identity as idolatrous lover.
The "lust of the eyes" has been the subject of extensive theoretical
discussion since Plato's Phaedrus. In the early modern period, it is a
topos in which seeing and desiring are intimately linked. Marsilio Ficino,
for example, in his Commentary to Plato's Symposium, privileges sight
as the sense that gives birth to desire: love begins with a visual wounding when gazes engage (161-62). But in the Polifemo, Acis does not
engage Galatea's eyes; he is seduced instead by her beauty. The notion
that desire is evoked in the singular act of contemplating beauty is a
central aspect of the early modern psychology of love. The serious
erotic lyric of Gongora's age takes in earnest what Andreas Capellanus
offers perhaps in jest in his ironic view of love in De amore (12th C).
"Love," writes Capellanus, "results from the sight of, and uncontrollable thinking about, the beauty of the other sex. . . . [I]t arises not
from any action, but solely from the thought formed by the mind as a
result of the thing seen" (32-35). There are certain echoes of Plato's
Phaedrus in Capellanus's text. Plato placed beauty in intimate relation
to vision in his discussion of eros: "[We] apprehend [beauty] through
the clearest of our senses, clear and resplendent. For sight is the keenest mode of perception" (250 D). Sight is the active agent of desire, as
we read in another passage of the Phaedrus: "[W]hen o n e . . . beholds a
godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there comes
upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision
inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god" (251 A). Plato's
Phaedrus (along with the Symposium) is at the root of the Neoplatonic
concept of the ascent of the soul from a vision of terrestrial beauty to
that of the godhead. In Gongora's Polifemo, Galatea is conceived as a
kind of "goddess," but Acis, like his sleeping idol, remains firmly "on
the ground." Beholding the beauty of the beloved does not elicit a
sight of the divine in the lover. There is no Neoplatonic surge towards
heaven in Gongora's passage.
As he surveys the body of lovely Galatea, Acis is constituted as a
voyeur. He enacts what has been called in psychoanalysis 'scopophilia,'
theorized by Sigmund Freud as one of the component instincts of sexual
drives. In "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Freud outlines three stages
to the workings of scopophilia: in the first, pleasure resides in the act
of looking at a person as an erotic object; in the second, the subject
gives up the other as object and turns his attention to a part of his own
body; in the third, the subject becomes, in narcissistic exhibitionism,
the object of another's look (14:129). Acis enacts the first and third
stages (the first here; the third below).4 As he pleasurably focuses his
attention on Galatea, her body emerges as the brilliant, idealized ob-
VISION, DESIRE, AND IDENTITY IN GONGORA'S POLIFEMO C8
ject on which his very identity as voyeuristic idolater depends. She is
depicted through catachreses in the form of exaggerated metaphors:
"cristal mudo," "bello iman," "idolo dormido." Acis's look transforms
Galatea into the desired object, and the catachreses in their "hyperbolic visibility" specularize her in a second and more profound way:
they create a visual display for the reader, who becomes a spectator,
along with Acis. At first, however, this specularization seems to be
called into question by the very trope that describes Galatea. It may
be argued that Gongora's catachreses, deprived as they are of their
referent, are characterized by remote analogies and a highly precious
language behind which Galatea remains "hidden." Catachresis seems
to be the reverse of enargeia, the rhetoric of presence premised on the
union of res and verba, and so a means to endow language with the
capacity to bring things "before the eyes." 5 Erasmus, connecting visual and verbal acts, instructs the writer to achieve enargeia by rendering a description of a thing so as to "display it to be looked at as if it
were expressed in color in a picture, so that it may seem that we have
painted, not narrated, and that the reader has seen, not read" (2.217;
trans in Cave 28-29). For this task Erasmus proposes select figures of
speech, including metaphor.
But if Gongora's catachreses as metaphors do not readily effect
the graphic immediacy called for by enargeia, they succeed nonetheless in presenting Galatea's reified body in all its visual and erotic force
as a splendid spectacle, silent and still, firmly holding the reader's look.
These catachreses successfully evoke Galatea's body because within
the economy of the text, as Paul Julian Smith observes about the
catachreses depicting the nymph's complexion ("purpura nevada, o
nieve roja," 14.108), they engage a "formalized and autonomous code
of representation" that need not "depend on the real" ("The Polifemo"
64).6 This code creates a logic of its own that (in interrelation with
other images in the poem) allows us to decipher what would otherwise remain undecipherable. Like "purpura nevada," which describes
Galatea's white and rosy flesh, "cristal mudo"of stanza 24 (in an interplay with the shining, flowing waters as "sonoro cristal") offers another visually potent image: the silent nymph's brilliant, white body.7
The two images, "bello iman" and "idolo dormido," that follow in
stanza 25 reinforce Galatea's compelling presence as object of contemplation under the reader's intense surveillance, paralleling Acis's own.
The specular display of the nymph's body is mimicked playfully by
the wind, which becomes delicately complicitous in the act. As it blows
gently over Galatea, it is as if it were drawing back the invisible curtains of her bed, made of grass and shade:
71
72
so Mary E. Barnard
Vagas cortinas de volantes vanos
corrio Favonio lisonjeramente
a la (de viento cuando no sea) cama
de frescas sombras, de menuda grama. (27.213-16)8
Awakened from her sleep by the sound of the fountain waters,
Galatea finds the gifts Acis has left for her. Moved by desire (as Cupid
strikes her breast with a gold dart), her eyes now awaken: "mira la
ofrenda ya con mas cuidado" (31.246; my emphasis). Galatea's eyes
had been privileged by the lyric speaker, who in stanza 13 initiates the
catalogue of her beauty traits through the typical early modern
reification and fragmentation of the female body (starting with the
eyes, as seen below, followed by her pearly-white brow and ear in
stanza 14). The fetishization of the nymph, with its scattering of exquisite body parts, points to the idealization of her beauty but also
marks her vulnerability as the object of desire. 9
Ninfa, de Doris hija, la mas bella,
adora, que vio el reino de la espuma. (...)
Son una y otra luminosa estrella
lucientes ojos de su blanca pluma:
si roca de cristal no es de Neptuno,
pavon de Venus es, cisne de Juno. (13.97-98,101-104)
Numerous interpretations have pointed out the exaltation of Galatea's
eyes, gleaming like stars against her white skin, an image centering on
the extravagant exchange of attributes in the interplay of Venus's swan
(its whiteness) and Juno's peacock (the luminous eyes in its feathers).10
Galatea's eyes, which had turned away from Polyphemus in scorn, now
become active agents in a love adventure that begins as she surveys
Acis's "ofrenda." 11 Though she cannot name the invisible "dueho" of
these gifts, she sees him tenuously in her visual imagination, sketched
by a gentle brush: "pincel suave / lo ha bosquejado ya en su fantasia"
(32.251-52).12
Then she finds him. Feigning sleep, Acis solicits Galatea's look,
exhibiting his body for her contemplation and thus enacting the next
stage of his scopophilic game. Galatea looks on, adopting the role of
voyeur as she pleasurably gazes at Acis, who now becomes the object
of contemplation and desire. The sketch drawn by Cupid in her imagination she now sees in full color (34.269-72). Acis's body is reified and
fetishized as hers had been earlier: sun for his hair, flowers for his
downy beard (35.277-80). Feminine traits depict a masculine beauty
that in exhibitionist performance firmly holds the woman's look ("atenta
mira," 273) and, in a singular reversal, "plays to" and signifies female
VISION, DESIRE, AND IDENTITY IN G6NGORA'S POLIFEMO Oi
desire. In stanza 33 the lyric narrator makes clear that Galatea, poised
motionless over Acis, still as an eagle about to descend on a fledgling
kite, does not understand the silent rhetoric of his feigning, his cunning act: "barbara al mentido / retorico silencio que no entiende" (25960). He is all spectacle, she all eyes, drinking in the love poison through
a visual "drinking in" of his image. Seeing and desiring are fused in
one powerful act that places her sexual urgency in relief:
en lo viril desata de su vulto
lo mas dulce el Amor, de su veneno;
bebelo Galatea, y da otro paso
por apurarle la ponzona al vaso. (36.285-88)
But Acis, too, is all eyes. Through half-closed eyes, he looks back intensely at Galatea: "Argos es siempre atento a su semblante" (37.292).
In classical mythology, Argus was the ever-waking, hundred-eyed creature chosen by jealous Juno to spy on lo, the nymph loved by Jupiter,
who turned her into a heifer. Argus was killed by Mercury, who lulled
him to sleep and severed his head. In the Greek poet Moschus, a peacock springs from Argus's blood (2.58ff). In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Juno
sets Argus's eyes on the feathers of her peacock (1.723-24). The reciprocity evident in the visual pleasure that the lovers take in each other
is now captured imagistically: Acis is identified with the creature whose
luminous eyes (the root org means "bright"; Ovid called Argus "stellatus
Argus" 'star-eyed Argus,' 664) appear on the plumage of Juno's peacock, the bird identified with Galatea in order to celebrate her eyes,
shining like stars against the whiteness of her skin. But no amount of
reciprocity can hide the fact that Acis has the upper hand.
Acis looking at Galatea is not only an Argus watching her every
move but also a lynx reading her every thought: "lince penetrador de
lo que piensa, / cinalo bronce o rmirelo diamante" (37.293-94). Acts of
looking and desiring are accompanied by the act of knowing. Early
modern writers drew an intimate relation between seeing and knowing. Tesauro equates vision and cognition: "To look with the eyes and
to contemplate with the intellect are two analogous types of knowledge."13 Leon Battista Alberti's theories of optics in De Pictura (ca.1435)
go one step further, placing seeing and knowing in a relation of power.
The geometrical analysis of the visual field in Alberti's theory of perspective, with its centrally fixed "vanishing point," yields epistemological mastery: "eye and knowledge come together; subject, object
and the distance of the steady observation that allows the one to master the other" (Heath 30). In Gongora's text, knowledge connected
with vision enters the erotic field as a product of the overriding power
73
74
so Mary E. Barnard
of desire. The seventeenth-century Gongora commentator Pedro Diaz
de Rivas writes: "Dice que cautamente estaba penetrando los intimos
pensamientos de Galatea, porque tal es la fuerza del amor, que le da al
amante perspicacia para que conozca lo interior aunque la persona
amada fuera una estatua immoble de bronce o diamante que no hiciera
acto exterior por donde se conocieran los interiores" (Discursos
apologeticos por el estilo del Poliphemo y Soledades, 1624; in Alonso 3:190).
Even though Galatea's predatory gaze of stanza 33 signals a kind
of mastery, as she is obliquely identified with the eagle ("ave reina"),
converting Acis into both object and prey, he is the true predator and
she the prey. Unlike the nymph who, in looking at her lover, does not
understand his silent, deceptive game, Acis's eroticized seeing encompasses acuteness of vision and of insight, both emblematized in the
figure of the lynx—a commonplace in Golden Age texts.14 Acis's knowledge of Galatea's secret thoughts, signaling his mastery over the nymph,
is a prelude to possession; anticipated by the telling "penetrador" that
qualifies the lynx, it is played out in the couple's love-making in stanzas 40-42. Galatea, the "monstro de rigor, la fiera brava" (31.245) to
her previous suitors, including Polyphemus, now gives herself to Acis.
Conceived as a figure of mobility, Galatea's identity is "fluid," "always
poised for departure" as she moves "from sea to land and back to sea
again" (Dolan 101). "Fugitiva ninfa," she flees her eager suitors (23.177),
escaping in swift flight as if propelled by feathers ("calzada plumas,"
16.127). Galatea's identity, however, shifts at the moment Acis enters
the scene. Even though she reveals her elusive nature when her arms
("fugitivo cristal," 41.328) playfully escape her lover as she coyly resists his sexual advances, she is anchored at least for a moment to their
nuptial bed ("talamo) in that identity that has been provided to her by
a desire she cannot contain or reject, brought to her by Acis, himself a
figure of boundless yet cunningly orchestrated desire.
Despite intimations of an inner life in Acis and Galatea—the sketching of his figure in her imagination, her feelings as she hovers over him
by turns agitated and hesitant, his reading of her thoughts—the lovers
remain closed vessels, essentially bodies divested of inferiority. Veiled
by a highly metaphorical language, they exist as specular objects; in
their visual, silent loveliness they are "all surface, all text."15 In Ovid's
Metamorphoses we hear Galatea's voice in her role as narrator of the
tale, but in Gongora's text only Polyphemus is endowed by the lyric
speaker with voice and subjectivity. The silence of Acis and Galatea
magnifies the oral performance of the Cyclops (Friedman 69).
Polyphemus looks inward in melancholic self-reflection. His song, full
of sadness and self-praise, is above all an entreaty to Galatea, a call for
her presence and gaze. Following Ovid, Gongora draws a Polyphemus
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with attributes of both the Theocretian shepherd and the savage Cyclops of Homeric epic. In Ovid's text, the self-pitying lover's lament of
sorrow and boasting mingles with rage: he promises Galatea that he
will tear Acis "limb from limb and scatter the pieces over" her "waves"
(13.865-66), and adds "I seem to be carrying Aetna in my breast with
all its violence" (868-69). In Gongora's poem, Polyphemus's lament
does not reveal his rage; the monster appears softer, more vulnerable,
even tender, as he exposes his inner self to Galatea, exalts his body and
makes it into a spectacle for her eyes. In praising her beauty and asking her to leave her dwelling place among the waves, vision is privileged:
"Deja las ondas, deja el rubio coro
de las hijas de Tetis, y el mar vea,
cuando niega la luz un carro de oro,
que en dos la restituye Galatea." (47.369-72)
The sea would witness ("el mar vea") the miracle of two eyes restoring
light to a world darkened by the gold chariot of the sun descending
into the horizon. But for all the flattery, what the Cyclops has in mind
for Galatea's eyes is none other than himself; the sea becomes the reflecting surface for his narcissistic act: "espejo de zafiro fue luciente /
la playa azul, de la persona mia" (53.419-20; my emphasis). Narcissism
flows from Polyphemus's melancholia.
In the early modern period, love melancholy is manifested as a
physical and psychological condition, resulting from a deep sense of
loss. It is "an affliction of the soul" accompanied by both sorrow and
exultation, and characterized by an intense awareness of the self. Melancholia is ascribed above all to the contemplative brooder, exemplified most tellingly in Petrarch's solitary wanderer of the Rime sparse,
who "alone and filled with care" ('solo e pensoso') in sonnet 35 walks
through deserted fields, "with steps delaying and slow" ('passi tardi
et lenti'). But this distressing condition is also a sign of genius, of
inspiration and creativity. According to Marsilio Ficino's astral magic,
Saturn, the highest of the planets under whose influence the melancholic is born, is a dark and malevolent star but also a "iuvans pater of
men of intellect" (Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl 254).16 In response to
an accusatory letter from his friend Giovanni Cavalcanti, Ficino writes,
"if it should be necessary that [the melancholic temperament] does
issue from Saturn, I shall, in agreement with Aristotle, say that this
nature is a unique and divine gift" (Letters 2:34). Ficino gave shape to
melancholia as the exclusive subjectivity of the man of letters. Modern psychoanalysis also interprets melancholia according to a double
VISION, DESIRE, AND IDENTITY IN G6NGORA'S POLIFEMO 0*
formula. In "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), Sigmund Freud writes
of the afflicted as "poor and empty," one who reveals "an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard" (14:246). But Freud's melancholic
is also a narcissist, exuberant in his eloquence. In insistent self-criticism, he needs to speak out, finding "satisfaction in self-exposure," a
kind of "narcissistic pleasure" in self-display. "It is what we call an
accredited pathology," writes Juliana Schiesari of Freud's assessment, "justified by the heightened sense of conscience that the melancholic is
said to display ostentatiously" (9; emphasis in original). Placing himself at the center of a scene of loss and eloquently voicing his discontent, Freud's melancholic projects himself as someone of exceptional
qualities, much like Ficino's celebrated, creative melancholic.
Gongora's desiring Polyphemus belongs to this Ficinian-Freudian
double scene. Perched on a high rock, the solitary Cyclops takes much
pleasure in displaying his sorrow and sense of loss in an exhibitionist
performance that also reveals a praiseworthy lover and poet. The disdainful Galatea causes his inner diminishment, its signs evident in sighs
and tears in his declamation of pain: "Sorda hija del mar, cuyas orejas
/ a mis gemidos son rocas al viento" (48.377-78). His tears are as abundant as the milk from his flock: "leche corren y lagrimas; que iguales /
en numero a mis bienes son mis males" (49.391-92). Yet alongside this
broken self, the slightly ridiculous and not so delicate seducer fashions
an inflated, narcissistic image in a singular spectacle for the absent
Galatea. Flaunting his lineage as the son of Neptune, he proclaims his
name "Polifemo te llama, no te escondas" (51.405) and boasts that a
groom so strong had never before been seen by Phoebus ("cual otro
no vio Febo," 407). He admires his voice, "escucha un dia / mi voz,
por dulce, cuando no por mia" (48.383-84) and his possessions. In
praising his stature, he portrays himself as a poet, his pen a finger
writing his sorrow in the sky: "y en los cielos, desde esta roca, puedo /
escribir mis desdichas con el dedo" (52.415-16). A Cyclopean man of
letters, Polyphemus would write in the heavens, as on a blank page,
what he now laments with his mellifluous voice.17 But for his most
exalted celebration, he presents a fetish to Galatea to admire and perhaps love, his eye:
"Mireme, y lucir vi un sol en mi frente,
cuando en el cielo un ojo se veia:
neutra el agua dudaba a cual fe preste,
o al cielo humano, o al ciclope celeste." (53.421-24)
The waters mirror the imagined beauty of this urgent lover, who is
both subject and object, spectator and spectacle, as in the ancient myth
77
78
so Mary E. Barnard
of Narcissus. In this narcissistic specular moment, Polyphemus proclaims himself a "celestial cyclops." Having robbed the sky of its sun,
he places it on his forehead, reducing the sun to a mere eye. In the
process, as Kathleen Dolan suggests, "he creates a myth of the self, a
fantasy of a solar, divine identity which is a source of light and vision"
(91). This idealized image reflected in the water carries implications
regarding self-love and self-knowledge, and self-deception as well. In
Jacques Lacan's "mirror stage," it is the joyful moment when the child,
reflected in a mirror or in the gestures of its mother or others, sees
itself whole for the first time (Ecrits 1-7). This experience of plenitude,
according to Lacan, inaugurates a series of specular moments where
individuals "seek and foster the imaginary wholeness of an 'ideal ego'"
(Bowie 106). For the rejected Polyphemus this is such a moment, an
instance of healing when he can imagine himself in full mastery, complete and restored. "Mireme" is a call to Galatea to see him as he
wants to be seen: not as a monstrous one-eyed Cyclops but as a heavenly being whose eye, seductive and irresistible in its luminosity, is a
thing of beauty. In effect, he seeks to rectify Galatea's image of him.
He seeks as well to refocus the lyric speaker's portrayal of his eye as
almost, but not quite like the sun: "de un ojo ilustra el orbe de su frente,
/ emulo casi del mayor lucero" (7.51-52; my emphasis). Polyphemus
makes the sea an accomplice in his self-celebration, the waters validating in indecision his vision of himself: "neutra el agua dudaba a cual
fe preste / o al cielo humano, o al ciclope celeste."
Polyphemus's self-fashioning depends on self-praising moments
from earlier Polyphemus figures, stretching from Theocritus, Ovid, and
Virgil to early modern reworkings such as Garcilaso's Eclogue I,
Giambattista Marino's Polifemeide, and Luis Carrillo y Sotomayor's
Fdbula de Polifemo y Galatea.1* The original source of Polyphemus's
looking into the waters is Theocritus' Sixth Idyll where Damoetas, in a
singing contest with Daphnis, impersonates the Cyclops: "But lately I
was looking into the sea, when all was calm; beautiful seemed my
beard, beautiful my one eye" (37). The solar metaphor linked to
Polyphemus's eye is supplied by Virgil and Ovid. In Virgil's Aeneid,
Achaemenides, one of Odysseus's companions, relates how to escape
the Cyclops's cave, they had to pierce his enormous eye, which he likens to "an Argive shield or the lamp of Phoebus" (3.637). In Ovid's
Metamorphoses, Polyphemus, his reflection in the waters a moment of
self-knowledge ("Surely I know m y s e l f . . . I liked my features when I
saw them," 13.840-41), justifies to Galatea his single eye with an allusion to the sun: "And what of that? Doesn't the great sun see everything here on earth from his heavens? And the sun has but one eye"
(852-53). In addition to the ancients, the early moderns offer recastings
VISION, DESIRE, AND IDENTITY IN GONGORA'S POLIFEMO C»
of Polyphemus at the mirror that may have served as models for
Gongora's Cyclops. The closest is Marino's identification of the sun
with Polyphemus's eye in sonnet 4 of his Polifemeide:
In grembo al chiaro Alfeo vidi pur ora
l'imagin mia nel verde ombroso chiostro,
ed a se stesso ha il suo splendor dimostro
il vivo Sol, che la mia fronte onora.
[In the bosom of the clear Alfeo, amidst the green, shady bower, I
saw just now my image, and to itself the living sun, which my forehead honors, has shown its splendor.] (my translation)
Gongora's Polyphemus supersedes Marino's in brightness and beauty
as he places the sun in an inferior position to himself. 19 Yet
Polyphemus's ideal image is an illusion, his wholeness and harmony a
fantasy. No matter how luminous, his eye-as-fetish is a mark of his
monstrosity and so a mark of his vulnerability, since it is clearly one of
the reasons for Galatea's rejection. An allusion to Polyphemus's blindness in stanza 43 foreshadows this self-deception: about to begin his
lament, "el fiero jayan ciego [de amor]" (341) sits on a silent cliff, which
in its figurative blindness reinforces the Cyclops'own ("linterna es ciega
y atalaya muda," 344). In Lacanian terms, the fragmenting force of
desire has indelibly marked him; his psychic instability is manifest in
the very medium that serves for his celebration. The mirroring waters
offer but a simulacrum of the self, a doubling that undermines knowledge of the self and, consequently, a true sense of personal identity.
Polyphemus's instability is reflected textually at the very moment he
looks into the waters, for in so doing he also "looks" into a multiplicity of poems that, like a fragmented prism, provides him fictional images with which to construct his own.
Ultimately, Polyphemus's ideal image is built on words, a splendidly modulated discourse in which he creates an identity at odds with
his actions. In making his imagined exterior beauty conform to an
inner beauty, he claims that love transformed him; but when goats
eating his vines interrupt his lament, his gentleness disappears, his
violence unleashed in a shower of fierce shouts and stones (59.470-71).
A seductive performance is betrayed by a monstrous nature. 20 No
longer in the realm of his Imaginary, of narcissistic self-reflexivity, the
Cyclops turns his sight outward to the lovers, who are running towards the sea, their bond broken by fear:
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VISION, DESIRE, AND IDENTITY IN G6NGORA'S POLIFEMO CS
81
Viendo el fiero jayan, con paso mudo
correr al mar la fugitiva nieve
(que a tanta vista el libico desnudo
registra el campo de su adarga breve)
y al garz6n viendo, cuantas mover pudo
celoso trueno, antiguas hayas mueve. (61.481-86)
As Polyphemus sees Acis, the darkness within erupts in jealous fury
and he hurls a rock, killing his rival. The world of night overcomes the
Cyclops—this, after all, is his true realm. His cave, depicted at the
outset as "el melancolico vacio" (6.42) and "caliginoso lecho, el seno
obscuro / ser de la negra noche" (5.37-38), circled by sad and somber
nocturnal birds (5.39-40), is an emblem of this primeval, subterranean
creature of Saturnine temperament. 21 .
Polyphemus is truly a "black sun," an ambiguous figure both dark
and luminous. In her study of depression and melancholia, Julia
Kristeva examines the image of the "black sun" in Gerard de Nerval's
sonnet "El desdichado" in ways that are suggestive here. In the first
quatrain of Nerval's sonnet, the lyric "I" portrays himself as follows:
"Je suis le tenebreaux, — le veuf, — l'inconsole,
Le prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie;
Ma seule etoile est morte, — et mon luth constelle
Porte le Soleil noir de la Melancolie."
["I am saturnine—bereft—disconsolate, / The Prince of Aquitaine
whose tower has crumbled; / My lone star is dead —and my
bespangled lute / Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia."] (Kristeva
141; emphasis in original)
Kristeva connects "tenebreux" ('dark' thus 'saturnine') with the Prince
of Darkness, and as such with Pluto, "whose deformity caused the
goddesses to flee (hence [the lyric speaker] is bereft [Nerval's "veuf"
'widower'])" (146). Kristeva also identifies the term with "night deprived of light. It conjures up the melancholy person's complicity with
the world of darkness and despair" (147). For Kristeva, the "black
sun" "takes up the semantic field of 'saturnine,'" but turns it "inside
out, like a glove: darkness flashes as a solar light, which nevertheless
remains dazzling with black invisibility" (147). The darkness of the
melancholic mood is such that it flairs out like a dazzling sun, blinding
in its power. So is Polyphemus's own darkness, its source a complex
mix of monstrous violence and melancholia. The eye that he deems a
sun is the very sign of his monstrosity, dark in its ugliness. As it flashes
its brilliance, it flashes its monstrous darkness, a deformity that, like
82
so Mary E. Barnard
Pluto's, causes his own goddess to flee. At the end, the despondency
of rejection blends with the rage of jealousy. With his desire not only
rejected but betrayed, Polyphemus's darkness, which is as potent as
his vision, bursts out: the melancholic and the monster fuse to kill and
destroy. The nymph Galatea, back in her watery domain, can do nothing but pray to the ocean deities, who save Acis by endowing him
with a new identity: they transform his bleeding body into a river.
Notes
focusing on the male gaze, Maria Cristina Quintero explores from a feminist perspective the relation between seeing and desiring for the construction of subjectivity in several Golden Age poems, including Gongora's sonnet "Mientras por competir con tu cabello." Quintero draws from theories
of vision that 1 use in this study. I have found her important essay most
useful.
2
In this essay the gaze refers to the act of looking. The gaze as theorized by
Jacques Lacan appears only briefly in note 11 to define Galatea's decentering
effect on Polyphemus. For a useful study on the "gaze" and the "look," see
Silverman.
3
A11 references to the Polifemo will be to Damaso Alonso's edition.
4
As we will see, Acis does not give up the desired object as he displays himself to Galatea since, as he becomes the object of the nymph's looking, he
looks back, complicating the third stage established by Freud.
5
On enargeia, see Cave; on the use of enargeia in the Golden Age, see Smith
("The Rhetoric of Presence") and Barnard. Quintero applies enargeia to
Gongora's sonnet "Mientras por competir con tu cabello" (498-99).
6
Even though Smith allows catachresis its representational qualities, he
claims that the codes of representation "resist totalization" (64). Commenting on the lines "tantos jazmines cuanta hierba esconde / la nieve de sus
miembros" (179-80), he writes, "the image is emblematic of a shimmering
linguistic surface which refuses to be anchored safely to the solid materiality of a pre-existing referent." In my analysis, the function of catachresis is
more expansive.
7
The catachresis "cristal mudo" connects with an earlier one in stanza 13
that renders Galatea as a rock crystal ("si roca de cristal no es de Neptuno,"
103), an image that celebrates her resplendent whiteness ("cristal"), along
with her callousness ("roca") in her role as "donna petrosa." Edward Friedman writes that "roca de cristal" "suggests a skin as soft as crystal [based on
the implied metaphor of water as soft crystal] in a nymph who is hard as
rock in disdaining her suitors" (62). According to Friedman, who also analyzes stanza 24, "[w]hat begins as catachresis, the joining of unrelated images, becomes the foundation of a linguistic deep structure, a unity built
from difference."
"Vilanova explains these verses: "El soplo del viento Favonio corrio
lisonjeramente cortinas imprecisas e impalpables, vagas cortinas de volantes
irreales y vanos, como si su leve soplo corriese suavemente unas cortinas
VISION, DESIRE, AND IDENTTTY IN GONGORA'S POLIFEMO C8
83
invisibles en torno al lugar en donde descansaba Galatea dormida" (2:119).
See also Parker 37, 68-69.
'On the fragmentation of the female body, see Vickers and Kritzman.
10
See, especially, Alonso 3:97-100 and Parker 24-25, 64-66.
"In her rejection of Polyphemus, Galatea stands for the gaze in a Lacanian
sense, a social construct that points to "the presence of others as such" (Four
Concepts 84). The Lacanian gaze is a decentering force that places the subject within the field of desire (desire understood here as "unmet demand").
As Galatea scorns the Cyclops, she becomes a most powerful decentering
presence, which he keeps alive in his imagination.
12
Emilie Bergmann connects the inscription of Acis's image in Galatea's mind
with Plato's account of perception and memory in his Philebus (249). According to Plato, "Memory and perception meet, and they and their attendant feelings seem to me almost to write down words in the soul. . . . The
painter, who, after the scribe [within us] has done his work, draws images in
the soul of the things which he has described" (in Bergmann 238).
"Cited in Quintero 492. Quintero explores the relations of seeing, desire,
and knowledge in Garcilaso's "Con ansia estrema de mirar" (490-93).
"The Diccionario de Autoridades offers the following for lince (cited in its
latinized form, lynce): "Se llama por semejanza el que tiene mui aguda la
vista: y metaphoricamente el que tiene gran perspicacia y sutileza, para
comprehender o averiguar las cosas dificultosas u ocultas."
"The citation is from Smith, who suggests that in Gongora's poem the body
"deprived of both interiority and essence, is all surface, all text" ("The
Polifemo" 67).
I6
For my discussion of melancholia, I have profited from studies by Wittkower
and Schiesari, in addition to Klibansky et al. I have also profited from Dolan
on melancholia in Gongora's Polifemo and Soufas on melancholia in Golden
Age texts, including the Polifemo.
17
Teresa Soufas calls Polyphemus "the mighty poetfaber whose song-withinsong is the only section presented in quotation marks as words directly attributable to their composer" (136). Soufas adds, "[Polifemo] parallels
Gongora himself through his difference, his melancholia, and the solitary
contemplation in which he writes his poetry."
18
For these and other sources of Polyphemus's reflection, see Vilanova 2.589605.
"Tomasso Stigliani's II Polifemo (1600) may have also served as a model, offering Polyphemus's gloating from another angle: "ei Polifemo grande, io
picciol cieio" (he, a big Polyphemus; I, a small sky'[in Alonso 3:266; my translation]).
20
Friedman interprets the passage as follows: "Polifemo's actions disprove
his rhetoric. The professed reformation through love is an illusion. The
destructive force cannot be contained, nor can violence be averted" (70). Anthony Cascardi points out Polyphemus's delusion and considers his song a
"pastoral parody" (133-34).
21
Soufas connects the cave to Saturn and melancholia (139-40). Dolan examines the cave in relation to Polyphemus's melancholic state, which she sees
as a threat to pastoral (53-68).
84
so Mary E. Barnard
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